“Not particularly,” he said. “I repair and customize non-Abraxas siphons, so I’m just here to deliver a finished product to a friend.”
“Ah,” she said. “So the cheap repair guy you know is . . . you.”
“Lucky me,” he said.
“Well, maybe I’ll look you up if my repair guy does a shit job,” she said.
For the first time in a long time, Sloane was standing in her own skin. She was not a Chosen One or Bert’s stray dog or Sloane Andrews the turbo-bitch who some Trilby reporter wanted to hate-fuck. And the second she had a little bit of herself back, she was desperate to get the rest.
“I better go,” she said. She didn’t want Kyros to come upstairs and spoil the moment.
“Well, if you want something to do later,” he said, “I sometimes pick up shifts at a bar in Printer’s Row. The Tankard.”
“The Tankard, huh?” she said. “I’ll see if I can escape.”
She smiled. He smiled. And she started toward the staircase.
But on the first landing, she couldn’t help but look back. He was standing right where she had left him, staring intently up at the Tiffany dome, his face rendered even paler by its light.
TOP SECRET
MEMORANDUM FOR: COMPTROLLER
ATTENTION: FINANCE DIVISION
SUBJECT: Project Delphi, Subproject 17
Under the authority granted in the memorandum dated 9 March 2004 from the director of Central Intelligence to the Department of Magical Oversight on the subject of Project Delphi, Subproject 17, code name Flickering, has been approved, and $1,000,000.00 of the overall Project Delphi funds have been allocated to cover the subproject’s expenses. Flickering is here defined as a small military force intended to serve and protect the valuable entity known as Mage until such a time as his purpose, dictated by the predictions of [redacted], code name Sibyl, is fulfilled.
Fatima Harrak
Director of Security
Department of Magical Oversight
TOP SECRET
21
THE TENEBRIS INCIDENT?” Kyros frowned and held the door for her as they exited the cultural center. “No one’s told you about the Tenebris Incident yet?”
“Should they have?”
“Well, it’s the foundational event of the modern world,” Kyros said. “So . . . let’s see. It happened in 1969. The USS Tenebris was a naval ship that set out to test the response of a ballistic missile to the intense pressures of Challenger Deep.”
Sloane waited for the walk signal to flip. “Um—the deepest part of the ocean, right?”
“The deepest part of the Mariana Trench, which is itself the deepest part of the ocean,” Kyros said. “They wanted to demonstrate naval strength after World War Two. Due to a minor equipment malfunction, the Tenebris’s deep-water submersible had to touch down on a particularly precarious spot in Challenger Deep. The rocky expanse it settled on collapsed, revealing an even deeper part of the deep later known as the Tenebris Gorge. No one is certain of what happened next, but the ballistic missile they had set out to test fired into the gorge, and the men in the Tenebris’s submersible were buried alive in rubble. After that, magic spread throughout the world, sometimes with . . . catastrophic results.”
The sidewalks were busier now, and louder. Whistles, hums, and sung vowels came from all directions in an array of pitches. Most of the workings, from what Sloane could see, were small and practical: a flash of light to hail a cab, a tiny flame to light a cigarette, a bubble of a shield to keep coffee from spilling. A group of teenagers sitting outside Jack’s Magic Beans linked pinkie fingers and hummed in unison, like they were performing a séance. Judging by the way they shed outerwear afterward, though, the working had been for warmth.
“What kind of catastrophic results?” Sloane said, still craning her neck to look at the teenagers. One of the girls was using her siphon to shoot bubbles out of her fingertip at one of the boys. He whistled and poked one of the bubbles as if to pop it. Instead, it turned solid and gleamed like glass.
But Kyros was talking again. “The earliest recorded incident was a sighting of the leviathan, but it could have been a false report. Everyone is always spotting monsters. But then there was the Graves Disturbance—gravity failed over the gorge, and a massive fishing boat just floated away along with a lot of water and, by some accounts, a baleen whale.”
“A whale?”
“Evidently. Electrical storms caused power outages across large regions—all of England, actually, and one left the entire state of Florida without electricity